Insults in flight as Klang mixes it

There was a moment, says Steve Hall, when he was a little
anxious that his most riveting, show-stopping moment in We are
Klang's third show might have been done before. That is to say,
that someone else might have thought about lying on his side with a
spotlight on his naked backside painted up as a face, "talking" out
of the crack down the middle. "I was worried that it was a really
obvious thing to do," he says. "And people said, 'well, no, it's
not obvious at all to lie on a table behind a curtain with a wig
taped to your waist'."

We are Klang consists of Hall, Greg Davies and Marek Larwood.
The moments when Hall's bottom performs or Larwood pretends to be a
dancing horse are Klang at their most surreal, but they also have a
strong line in insult. They dish it out to each other and to any
public figure in the firing line; then invite the audience to chuck
insults at them, as if they were coconuts at a shy. Few holds are
barred. Hall still remembers how surprised he was when a very old
woman snapped at Larwood that he looked "like a dead Gollum".

"I think we all have quite extreme senses of humour," he says.
"But we've never wanted to describe ourselves as non-PC, because
we've never felt we wanted to deliberately shock. What we agreed
was that there was a difference between sophisticated offensiveness
and gratuitous offence." Comedy audiences are so literate these
days, he thinks, that they reject anything gratuitous as simply not
good enough. "So, when you're being offensive, people know there is
a wink to it."

No subject is off limits but they know instinctively when a gag
pushes past tolerability. "We are going for the spirit of play. So,
if you go too far, it is because you become a bit of a bully, too
aggressive, and you suddenly realise the audience has gone." He
makes an "oohh" of disgust. For example, he says, they once devised
a gag about a woman who was so regularly "knocked into the middle
of next week" by her husband that she became a time traveller. It
was a good line, but the song they sang about it fell absolutely
flat; wife-beating just wasn't funny.

Racism is not funny either but We are Klang's song about what it
is like to be Jewish, based entirely on any word that rhymes with
Jew ("My bedroom has a lovely view! And all because I'm a Jew!"),
certainly does work. There was a time, admits Hall - who is, in
fact, Jewish - when they worried about why people laughed at it.
"Because you do see clubs where there are people who, if you
offered them an anti-Semitic joke, would laugh.

"So, I thought the best way to find out would be to invite along
as many of my Jewish friends as possible. And they loved it,
because it is a reclamation. For so long, any humour about Judaism
had to be po-faced. So, we thought, 'why can't we be radical and
have a song about Judaism that is just silly?"' They always wanted
the show to be joyous. Ideally, the audience would leave happy,
singing their daft songs.

Hall met Greg Davies when they both enrolled in a course for
aspiring comedians run once a week from a room underneath a
transvestite bar in Soho. That was four years ago. Davies was
teaching drama; Hall was working in a call centre and, he suspects,
showing every sign of clinical depression. He had tried doing
stand-up four years before, without success, but remained a huge
comedy fan; the only reason he did the course, he says, was because
it was run by one of his favourite comedians, Logan Murray. "I
thought, 'well, there are very few names that would spur me into
action, but I want to see what he does."'

What he learned, he says, was to forget about trying to fit
anyone else's mould. "There are people who say you can't teach
people to be funny," he says, "and, while that is obviously true,
Logan's thing was that even the least funny person anyone knows,
the most unfunny person in the office, will be funny every now and
then. And why? It's because for that moment, they tell a story
where they know exactly which phrases to use and the relationships
involved."

The three Klangs' relationship with each other is, in fact,
central to their performance. Before they moved into sketch comedy,
Hall and Davies appeared on the same bill and shared the same flat
for an entire Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They wanted Larwood, whom
they knew from the circuit, to come too but he couldn't afford
it.

Even within the stand-up format, says Hall, "we tried to make it
clear we all knew each other and far too well. And that's quite
nice. It's as if, by being brutally honest with each other, it
breaks through everything." The three of them have argued,
seriously. "But I'd much rather be part of a group where you can
lose your temper. If everyone is trying to be harmonious and never
stands up for something they feel passionate about, I'd imagine it
would end up being a really bland show."

Their first Edinburgh show as We are Klang won the Spirit of the
Fringe award and was hailed as a breath of fresh air. In many ways,
however, they see themselves as quite traditional; they do sketches
with a rapid laugh count and pay-off punchlines. Hall initially
"ran away" from sketch comedy, he says, because nobody could better
Fry and Laurie.

"And although we attempt to have a really modern sensibility -
The Mighty Boosh are a huge influence on us - we do kick old
school." He loved Alexei Sayle; Larwood regards Harry Enfield as
"an absolute god"; they all, inevitably, revere Monty Python. "So,
we're always nervous when people say we are the future of comedy,"
says Hall. "It's very flattering. But we're also the history of
comedy."

History with a grubby face, perhaps, but also a cheeky grin.

We are Klang at the Victoria Hotel, Little Collins
Street, city, from April 5-29. Book on 1300 660 013.The Age is a
Melbourne International Comedy Festival sponsor.